Each day, thousands of commuters
whiz past the dusty weed patch north of I-670 near Joyce and Old Leonard avenues, unaware
the sleepy rows of tractor-trailers parked there are sharing a bed with pro football
history.

Pro football history? Here?

Next to a tarp-covered mountain of salt? On a piece of
desolate Norfolk-Southern Railroad ground so homely that dump truck drivers probably
refuse to go out there?

Pro football was obviously different in those days. The six
Nesser brothers -- seven for one season -- and their teammates on the Columbus Panhandles
worked all day on that grimy strip of land, at the shops of the Panhandle Division of the
Pennsylvania Railroad. They did backbreaking, muscle-straining work for 10 hours a day but
always rushed through lunch so they could practice football for 50 minutes before they
returned to their labors.

Never heard of the Nessers? It's not surprising. The city's
long-standing indifference to this family is a crime.

From about 1907 to 1925, they were only the most famous
football family in the United States. They were reputed to be the sport's most brutal
bunch of bone-busters, in a game that makes today's NFL seem tame as croquet.

"They all worked for the railroad," said Irene
Cassady, 68, whose mother, Rose, was a Nesser and whose father, John Schneider, was a
Panhandles teammate. "Some of them were boilermakers and my dad was a blacksmith. I
think a couple of the brothers worked in the blacksmith shop, too. The shops were all
close together and they would all eat lunch and then play football on their lunch hour. .
. . If it was raining, they played euchre. If it wasn't, they practiced football."

Pro football was different in those days. That much is as
plain as the nose on Ted Nesser's face.

"Dad had his nose broken eight times," Mary
Katherine (Babe) Sherman said. "Dr. Charles Turner -- he had his office on Mount
Vernon Avenue -- he said, 'Ted, we're not going to set that nose any more; you'll just
break it again.' "

Ted Nesser's 90-year-old daughter laughed.

"The only person I knew who had a nose like my dad's
was Knute Rockne," she said. "Dad used to say, 'We both have our nose all over
our face.' "

In a game devoid of padding -- it was a game of leather
helmets and bone-to-bone tackles -- the Nesser brothers were bigger and stronger than most
of their opponents. In their prime, they averaged more than 210 pounds apiece, in an era
in which the average professional lineman weighed about 180 pounds. Frank was 6 feet 3 and
the heaviest at 250. Ray and Fred were the tallest at 6-5; Phil was 6-4, 236; Al was 6-2.
John, the oldest, and Ted, the captain, were only 5-10. But Ted weighed 225 and might have
been the toughest of the bunch. In 1908, he reputedly stayed for a game with two broken
bones protruding from an arm because he thought his brothers needed him.

Joe Carr, the team's business manager (he later became NFL
president, who had the league office in Columbus from 1921 until he died in 1939), once
remarked that there "aren't three good ribs amongst the lot of those Nessers,"
and he might not have been exaggerating.

"Uncle Ray was the baby of the family and he didn't
play very much," Sherman said. "I remember my older sisters telling me that he
sprained his ankle in a game one day, and they put liniment on it and put his sock and
shoe back on. He went out and played with it, and when they took the sock and shoe off,
the skin just came right off of his foot."

Not all brawn

Tough guys, those Nessers. And smart. None of them attended
college, but they could have. Their father, Theodore Nesser, was lured from Germany by the
railroad and designed the steam engine the Pennsy used for years. When the railroad
tweaked his design to get around his patent, Nesser quit and started a plumbing business.
Frank was offered a chance to go to Notre Dame but chose to get married instead. Phil was
a math genius.

"He taught at Central High School until they found out
he didn't have a degree and they made him quit," said Kate Benson, Phil's 77-
year-old daughter. "He never went to school beyond the fourth grade, but he had
formulas you wouldn't believe."

Ted was a football genius and is credited with originating
several plays -- the triple pass, the criss- cross and the short kickoff -- that became
popular in the college game of that day.

Ted also was the first Nesser to make money at football,
playing for Massillon's state championship team in 1904, '05 and '06. Older brother John
also played for the Tigers, in 1905, before Carr formed the Panhandles in 1907. At that
time, most of the Nessers lived with their parents at 1608 Harvard Ave., a large two-story
house that's still there. They walked a mile or so to work at the Panhandle Shops, and
rode their fathers' horse-drawn plumbing wagon to practice at Recreation Park, Franklin
Park, Ohio Field or wherever they could find to play.

Frank Nesser frequently engaged in kicking contests with
Jim Thorpe; he once was credited with a 63-yard field goal and old-timers used to recall
his punts of 70 yards in the air.

"Mama (Rose Nesser Schneider) said they would get (to
games) ahead of time and Uncle Frank would kick," Cassady said. "He would stand
by the one (set of goal posts) and kick to the other one. Now what is that, 100
yards?"

From 1909 to 1917, the Nessers and the Panhandles were
successful on the field, as well. In 1909, they were 7-1-1 against the best teams in Ohio
and Pennsylvania, the two states at the heart of pro football's universe at that time. In
1915, they were joined by former star Ohio State quarterback Louis (Pick) Pickerel and
center Hiram Brigham, and went 9-3-1. In the penultimate game of the season, Brigham was
kicked in the head during a 26-0 win over the Columbus Barracks, was taken to a hospital
unconscious and almost died.

Similar injuries were more common to the teams who played
the Panhandles. Ted reputedly ended the career of Willie Heston, a former Michigan
All-American, with a hard tackle in the Massillon-Canton game in 1906. Rockne, the famous
Notre Dame coach, once said "getting hit by a Nesser is like falling off a moving
train."

Their reputation spread quickly. In 1909, Texas A&M
coach Charley Moran, fearing a loss to Texas, offered to pay Ted for his help. Even though
Ted had never finished high school, he wore a freshman beanie on campus and suited up for
the game. The Aggies never trailed, so Ted never got in, but afterward Moran paid him $200
for his trouble. Having a Nesser on the sideline was a nice insurance policy.

"Sometimes if the Panhandles would go to different
places and the other team didn't have enough players, they would take somebody from the
Panhandle team," Cassady said. "But they never took one of the Nesser brothers.
My dad (John Schneider) said, 'I was the poor fool who got picked to play against the
Nessers, and they pulverized me.' He used to say, 'I think that was my scariest day, other
than the day I asked the brothers if I could marry their sister.' "

Family affair

There were 12 children in the Nesser family. The only boy
who didn't play football, Pete, weighed 325 pounds. Ted's son Charles also played briefly
for the Panhandles, as did Ted Hopkins (sister Anna's son). So at one point there were
seven Nesser brothers, a son, a nephew and a brother-in-law on the team. Two of the
brothers' sons, John P. and Bill, eventually played football for Ohio State.

Four of the brothers retired as players after the 1921
season, including 46-year-old John, who held the record as the NFL's oldest player until
it was broken by George Blanda. Al continued to play for the Akron Pros and the New York
Giants, was an all-league guard as late as 1927 and was eventually named to the Helms
Foundation Pro Football Hall of Fame.

But none of that ever seemed to matter much in the
self-styled football town they represented. By the time pro football caught up to the
college game in popularity, the Nessers were a faded memory.

"I think they were just so darn happy playing and
reminiscing about it," Cassady said, "that I don't think they cared."

It's a good thing. Columbus still feels pretty much the
same way about them. There is a Panhandles exhibit in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in
Canton, but no mention of them in the city where they lived and played. Not a Nesser
street, not a Nesser alley, not even a Nesser plaque recognizing their pioneering ways.

The late Vera Nesser, Fred's daughter, tried to get the
city to name a street for the Nessers about 15 years ago and got snubbed. Apparently, city
officials didn't know much about them, either.

One reason is that the Panhandles played most of their
games on the road, using their free railroad passes to cut down on expenses. They would
get nice guarantees in places like Massillon, Canton, Detroit, Cleveland, Fort Wayne and
Akron, where they wouldn't have to go to the trouble of renting grounds, printing and
selling tickets, etc.

"When I first started playing, the players split $500
or $600 at the season's end," Al Nesser remembered later. "But in 1915, one of
our most successful years, the first-stringers collected $1,500 apiece. I felt like a
millionaire."

They played a few games at Recreation Park, now occupied by
a Big Bear store in German Village, and at Neil Park on the west side of Cleveland Avenue,
across from Fort Hayes, but mostly they traveled.

Drawing power

They were a huge draw everywhere they went -- a game
against the Detroit Heralds in Navin Field (Tiger Stadium) in 1916 drew 7,000, even though
the Heralds hiked their ticket prices from $1 to $1.50 only for games against the
Panhandles and Thorpe's Canton Bulldogs -- and were written up extensively in out-of-town
newspapers, but barely received notice here.

"The Panhandles received excellent newspaper coverage
outside of Columbus," Keith McClellan wrote in The Sunday Game, a book on the
early years of professional football. "The Panhandles rarely received more than token
coverage in Columbus during this period, because the fans were focused on Ohio State
University games and were not much interested in games played by railroad workers. As a
consequence, the Panhandles never achieved much of a hometown following."

At the time, that might have even been understandable. But
what about the decades since? The Panhandles were charter members of the NFL when it was
formed in 1920 and stayed until 1926 -- the last three years as the Tigers because most of
the Nessers and their railroad workers were too old to play by that time.

Pro football historians Mike Rathet and Don R. Smith wrote
in Their Deeds and Dogged Faith that "next to the Canton Bulldogs of the Jim
Thorpe era, they were probably the best-known team of the pre-NFL years." Yet they
have never been formally inducted into the Hall of Fame, and in Columbus they remain as
faceless as that weed patch near I-670.

It's about time the Nessers are given their due -- here and
in Canton.

"It's sad they didn't honor them some way,"
Cassady said. "Vera always wanted something Downtown, and that was all spoken for.
But even Leonard Avenue going out there -- I'd be proud if they'd name (it) Nesser Way or
something like that. Gosh. It doesn't matter where it is, in a city this size, they should
be able to do something."